Monsters of the market : zombies, vampires, and global capitalism / by David McNally.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Dissecting the labouring body : Frankenstein, political anatomy, and the rise of capitalism -- "Save my body from the surgeons" -- The culture of dissection : anatomy, colonisation, and social order -- Political anatomy, wage-labour, and destruction of the English commons -- Anatomy and the corpse-economy -- Monsters of rebellion -- Jacobins, Irishmen and Luddites : rebel-monsters in the age of Frankenstein -- The rights of monsters : horror and the split society -- Marx's monsters : vampire-capital and the nightmare-world of late capitalism -- Dialectics and the doubled life of the commodity -- The spectre of value and the fetishism of commodities -- "As if by love possessed" : vampire-capital and the labouring body -- Zombie-labour and the "monstrous outrages" of capital -- Money : capitalism's second nature -- "Self-birthing" capital and the alchemy of money -- Wild money : the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation -- Enron : case-study in the occult economy of late capitalism -- "Capital comes into the world dripping in blood from every pore" -- African vampires in the age of globalisation -- Kinship and accumulation : from the old witchcraft to the new -- Zombies, vampires, and spectres of capital : the new occult economies of globalising capitalism -- African fetishes and the fetishism of commodities -- The living dead : zombie-labourers in the age of globalisation -- Vampire-capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa -- Bewitched accumulation, famished roads, and the endless toilers of the earth -- Conclusion ugly beauty : monstrous dreams of utopia.

"Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’."--Publisher's website.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.